Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the harvest

February 4, 2015 • 10:35 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “pick,” deals with a problem that I’ve written many words about: the selective use of scripture to either buttress your moral feelings or to distinguish the “real” from the “metaphorical.” But the artist’s advantage is the ability to convey exactly the same idea in four panels and a few words. Kudos to him/her:

2015-02-04

21 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the harvest”

    1. Is it particularly important to cherry-pick cherries? Is there more individual variation among cherries than among other fruit?

      2. Maybe people just like cherries more. (I do.)

        There’s also that adjustable hydraulic lift vehicle called a cherry-picker (not an apricot- or peach-picker).

    1. I think The Author is (sensibly) keeping his/ her head down on that very point. Something to do with a justifiable fear of getting whacked around the head with a meat cleaver.

  4. Cool. I’ve never seen the car backdrop before; is that relatively new, relatively rare, or am I just out of touch?

    1. I don’t remember ever seeing it either. I wonder if it’s the start of new vistas, or if it’s just too cold to walk to and from the Cock ‘n’ Bull?

      1. If you go to the site and scroll back through the years, I think you will find a number of car-situated episodes. Usually Mo is driving, although his vision is often sadly restricted, as in this one.

    2. When the “new boys” had visits from Moses, they used the car on a few occasions.

  7. Any time a believer starts cherry-picking verses from their chosen holy book so they can avoid the horrible parts, I point them to this piece of writing: A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies. It should be required reading for all religious people. Here’s how it starts:

    ”
    You are General Eisenhower. It is 1945. The Allies have just triumphantly liberated Berlin. As the remaining leaders of the old regime are being tried and executed, it begins to become apparent just how vile and despicable the Third Reich truly was.

    In the midst of the chaos, a group of German leaders come to you with a proposal. Nazism, they admit, was completely wrong. Its racist ideology was false and its consequences were horrific. However, in the bleak poverty of post-war Germany, people need to keep united somehow. They need something to believe in. And a whole generation of them have been raised on Nazi ideology and symbolism. Why not take advantage of the national unity Nazism provides while discarding all the racist baggage? “Make it so,” you say.

    The swastikas hanging from every boulevard stay up, but now they represent “traditional values” and even “peace”. Big pictures of Hitler still hang in every government office, not because Hitler was right about racial purity, but because he represents the desire for spiritual purity inside all of us, and the desire to create a better society by any means necessary. It’s still acceptable to shout “KILL ALL THE JEWS AND GYPSIES AND HOMOSEXUALS!” in public places, but only because everyone realizes that Hitler meant “Jews” as a metaphor for “greed”, “gypsies” as a metaphor for “superstition”, and “homosexuals” as a metaphor for “lust”, and so what he really meant is that you need to kill the greed, lust, and superstition in your own heart. Good Nazis love real, physical Jews! Some Jews even choose to join the Party, inspired by their principled stand against spiritual evil.
    “

    2. Cf. also the Star Trek episode “Patterns of Force”, which makes the point that Nazism is not just flawed because it had evil policies, but because the *structure* is wrong – the “leader principle” is itself evil because of how it could be abused.

  8. Very good. Even the nice, friendly Christian ideals such as ‘love thy neighbor’, and ‘do unto others…’ was really meant to apply to fellow Christians. As for outgroups, not so much.

    2. Uh… what about JC’s parable of the Good Samaritan and his separate command to “love your enemies”? (The latter in the sense of general benevolence, not affection.)

      Neither original BTW but they’re there.

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